Statement of the Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate to identification systems, and more particularly to biometric identification processing systems which are both distributed and scalable.
Description of the Related Art
The related art concerns IP cameras, biometric processing gateways, access control systems and cloud computing based services which offer biometrics identification as a service. Biometrics systems perform identification of people based on one or more modalities such as fingerprint, iris, face, palm or body vein pattern, gait, and so on. The task related to biometrics identification is computationally intensive. Certain modalities such as finger print require relatively lower computation power and the identification task can be implemented at the edge node (close to the origin of biometrics data). Certain other modalities such as face, gait, and body vein (which are based on video capture) involve considerable data bandwidth. These modalities also require higher computation power for processing and identification. Such levels of computation power are typically not provisioned in the camera or capture devices but are instead performed in a remote computer or a cloud-based server. In the case of face recognition, a compressed video stream from the camera is transmitted to the server. The server decodes the compressed video frames, detects and extracts the faces and performs face recognition. Such an arrangement requires transmission of continuous video stream from the camera to the cloud-based server and therefore necessitates a relatively high network bandwidth.
Accuracy of biometrics identification, especially in a scenario involving face recognition, depends on the illumination conditions. The physical installation setup and lighting conditions have a significant impact on accuracy of identification rates. The uneven lighting can cause shadows on the face of the persons as they walk towards the camera. Accordingly, the installation process of a face recognition system in different deployment conditions can be a challenging task.